Front Yard (2 page)

2

“Y
ou mean to tell me a man was
killed
in our backyard?”

Nan's knees buckled. She propped herself against the front counter and gripped its ledge hard. Having steadied herself, she pivoted away from the woman at the information counter to stare, goggle-eyed, at George.

George was doing his speak-no-evil impression by clamping his hand over his mouth and chin. He did that when he couldn't decide whether to be astonished, scared, or completely indifferent. Nan wished he would stop; it made him look like such a dolt.

But this! It was disturbing enough that their placid and orderly little oasis at one time harbored thickets of weeds, natural grasses gone wild, and shrubs and trees growing and multiplying by nature unchained. To now be told that it was the scene of a violent death, why, it was unthinkable!

“Well, we don't actually know that for a fact,” said the historian, a Miss Price.

Miss Price's baleful glare had challenged them to approach her as they sauntered into the Livia Historical Society during one of the few times it was open to visitors: ten a.m. to eleven a.m. on the third Saturday of the month, alternating months, even-numbered years only. “But we are reasonably certain that two men associated with Sieur de La Salle—Messrs. Boyer and Ducharme—departed from La Salle's main group at some point. They might have made their way to Livia and camped out in the vicinity of Bluegill Pond. The best place to camp along Bluegill Pond would have been the east side, on top of the rise on which your house now stands.”

“This guy was actually
killed
on
our
property!” George said. “Whoa!”

“Yeah,” said Nan. “Who was this ‘La' guy?”

“La Salle, the French explorer.”

“Oh,
that
La Salle,” George said. “Sure. The guy who canoed the Mississippi all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. And that was before they had lightweight Mylar materials. Ha-ha! Of course I've heard of him! And who would have been the victim, Boyer or Ducharme?”

“Very possibly . . . Boyer,” said Miss Price. She peered at an old map covered with indecipherable markings, but on which the pear shape of Bluegill Lake was plainly visible. “The murderer, Ducharme, might have buried him out of guilt; they were friends and early business partners in the fur trade with the Indians, after all. Or maybe he wanted to hide the evidence. Well, let's be fair to Ducharme; he might have killed in self-defense. Most likely, Boyer's body was just left there to be consumed by wild animals.”

George shuddered.

“And that was a very long time ago, I take it?” said Nan. George caught the hint of a tremor in her voice.

“Of course, Mrs. Fremont. The voyageurs were active in the area from the mid-sixteen hundreds all the way until the early eighteen hundreds. La Salle flourished in the late sixteen hundreds. This would have occurred around then. I would know—I have specialized in the study of the Livia area my entire adult life.”

Nan released her hunched-up shoulders.

“Well, I'm really relieved. When you first mentioned it, I thought you were talking about something that happened not all that long ago.”

“Why, certainly not!” Miss Price gasped. “Most certainly not! This is a historical society, not the local constabulary. What, do you think French explorers and missionaries and fur traders were mucking around here after World War Two? With maybe hundred-horsepower Evinrude outboard motors on their birchbark canoes, and outfitted with breathable-fabric anoraks and bazookas to ward off the bad old suburbanites?”

Nan jerked back from the counter at this sudden outburst.

“Well, when you first told us about a murder, you didn't say right away when it was. And it's still a little unsettling to know someone might have been killed in your backyard, no matter when. Goodness!”

“Some believe the spirit lives on,” said Miss Price. “Perhaps you'd better be mindful of that, hmmm?”

“Actually,” said George, clearing his throat and glancing at Nan, whose pursed lips and unflinching stare he knew to be the signal to be resolute. “We wanted to know if you have records of anything else . . . uh . . . buried there.”

Miss Price gave a start.

“Some
thing
buried?” she said. Nan and George glanced at each other. A telepathic connection warned them to shift into evasive mode.

“Uh . . . uh . . . some old papers and things like that,” George said. Why, oh why can't my husband be a better liar when the need arises? Nan mused to herself disconsolately.

“Buried? Now, let me think . . . Ah, yes. I've heard that one. Yes, indeed, I've heard that one. Yes. Not papers. No, siree. It's the lost treasure of Livia. Ha-ha!”

George and Nan smiled politely as Miss Price continued.

“As the story goes, pirates from the Spanish Main used to travel fifteen hundred miles inland to bury their doubloons right here.” Miss Price stabbed her finger at the point on the map that marked the Fremonts' three-quarter-acre lot. “There could be a dozen chests of pieces of eight buried in your yard. Those pirates would have sailed right up from the Gulf on to the Mississippi, veered on to the Muskmelon River, branched off on the Big Turkey, and found your place on the high ground. Probably ten, twelve feet down, but who knows exactly where.”

“You're not serious!” Nan cried.

“Dead serious. You know what else is there? Jesus's bifocals. Dropped off after the Last Supper. So is Captain Kidd's spittoon, and the lost racing bike of the Incas. All right there in your yard waiting to be dug up.”

George frowned. Nan frowned. Miss Price coughed up a brittle laugh.

“I'm pulling your legs, Mr. and Mrs. Fremont. There's no buried treasure of Livia. Otherwise, I'd have the complete dossier on it, and it would have been dug up a long, long time ago.” She glared at Nan and George with bulging eyes.

“Not about the murder, though,” she said, her voice quavering. “I wasn't joking about the murder.”

 

Gwendolyn Price wrung her hands in furious agitation as she watched the Fremonts walk out the front door, tinkling the little bell that signaled the comings and goings of the few visitors who ever passed through the portals of the Livia Historical Society.

She couldn't believe it—4250 Payne Avenue come back to haunt her, and after she had pretty much given up on it! How long had it been since she was forced to sell the place? How many years had she yearned and striven to get it back?

The old farmhouse had been torn down and a new house built that had nothing to do with farming. Two sets of owners came and went. As a teacher subject to continual layoffs and bouncing from school district to school district while caring for a terminally ill mother, she was powerless to do anything about it.

When her mother finally died, Miss Price went back to college for her master's degree and eventually found a place in the history department of the St. Anthony metro's most prestigious private school. Having never married, and with only one true passion—the history and genealogy of Livia—making demands on her time and resources, she was able to amass a large savings over the years. So, when the house, or, more important, the property, came up for sale again, she was ready. But then, she was outbid by these . . . these Fremonts! Why, they had bought the property from right under her nose!

Now who, of all people, should suddenly come waltzing in on a quiet Saturday morning!

“Astonishing!” she blurted to no one in particular since there was no one else in the big museum-styled room at the moment. She had acquired the habit of talking to herself from years of living alone.

Hold on! There were possibilities here. Miss Price's febrile imagination began firing up, but it was moving in too many directions. She was being handed an opportunity, given a sign, but how to proceed? They had heard something. They had heard talk and hearsay, probably nothing more. But even talk and hearsay could be dangerous. They might find it, and after she had searched high and low these many years.

“Who do they think they are?” she mumbled. “They don't
know
anything, do they? But, yes, they must. They know something is buried there. Or maybe just suspect. That's why they came in. They must be up to no good.”

At first shocked and confused when the Fremonts had walked up to her counter and presented the address she knew so well, Miss Price had struggled to figure out what to do. Ultimately, she had chosen on the fly to tell them some truths and some falsehoods. Voyageurs could well have visited the site. They might have even camped there. But nobody would know who they were.

The murder was pure fabrication. Why had she made that up? To throw them a red herring. It just wouldn't do to tell them nothing at all had happened there. That would arouse suspicion more than anything. The rest was pure buffoonery, in detail if not in general concept. She had masked the true situation further by laughing off the whole mystery as a joke.

Miss Price's face reddened with solitary mirth. Private jokes were so much better than shared ones, she reflected. But this was no time for levity. Time to stop amusing herself and get back on-task. She gave her cheek a stinging slap.

“Yeow!” she cried. “Not so hard.”

Self-mortification was Miss Price's way of keeping her thoughts from wandering. It could be a slap, a pinch, a jab with a just-sharpened pencil. As a teacher, she had thrown erasers and even pieces of chalk at inattentive students. Jarring acts of physical violence, she found, were excellent focusing mechanisms. That practice had stopped when several wealthy board members had threatened to pull their children out of the school and run Miss Price out of town on a rail. But Miss Price had taken that lesson and applied it to herself. She frowned at the memory and found herself beginning to dwell on it. That called for a pinch.

“Ouch!”

Miss Price retrieved a business card from her purse. She picked up the receiver of the Historical Society's circa-1960 Princess phone and dialed the number on the card. After four rings, the voice mail kicked in. The recording startled her. It started with the booming of cannons and clatter of musketry. Then, barely audible above the din, came the sound of a muffled voice.

“Hi, Scroggit Brothers here. Antiquities Sales and Investigations. History is our strategic objective. Can't talk now. The Rebs are coming. Looks like our regiment will be right in the thick of it. Leave your name, number, and a brief message and we'll call you back once we've repulsed the attack. Or you can find our stores on the Web at
www.fightyankee.com
. Here they come, boys. Aim low.”

The Scroggit brothers were borderline criminals with few scruples when it came to ferreting out and scavenging historical rarities. They had, in fact, unearthed such items for her on more than one occasion. Her Indian peace pipe, for instance. And pioneer woman Violet Tagget's diaries. Tales of their extralegal methods had failed to shock her, which was good because it was time to take off the kid gloves and claim what was rightfully hers.

“Gwendolyn Price here,” Miss Price barked into the phone after the beep. “I have a mission for you that requires discretion. This demands your immediate attention. I promise a commission based on the finding, which will be significant in both a pecuniary and historical sense. Please respond ASAP.”

3

“S
tupid full-of-herself historian!” sputtered George as he and Nan drove back home. “How can they have somebody like that running the Historical Society and dealing with the public? You'd never know when she was telling the truth and when she was playing her little joke at your expense.”

George and Nan decided to make their way home via a slow detour down hidden, winding residential streets in tucked-away neighborhoods, rather than going straight back along the most direct route—34th Avenue West. This was their scenic tour. Now that the Livia gardening season should be in full swing, it was time to see what some of their favorite gardeners were up to. But their mood, which would ordinarily have been bright and expectant—or at least moderately curious, in George's case—was colored by what Nan referred to as the “ugly incident” at the Historical Society.

“The nerve of her!” Nan said. “Getting us going the way she did. I should have known from the moment she started talking about pirates. Who ever heard of pirates in Livia? Or on the Big Turkey River! You can barely get a kayak down that thing. Too bad for Jim. It would have made him so happy to find something really big with his whatchamacallit.”

“Metal detector.”

“Yah, metal detector.”

“Well, we did what he asked,” George said. “We checked it out and found
nada
. Jim and his stupid buried-treasure story! What a bunch of baloney! No more digging up the yard to find maybe a few screws and some flattened cans, like he did last year.”

“Just hold on, dear,” Nan said. “I've been doing some revisionist thinking about this. It's a big yard. I wouldn't be surprised if he missed a few spots, front and back. We're just starting our big front yard gardens, so what's the harm in him rooting around before Mary and Shirelle get planting? Heck, he can still dig around a little in the backyard under where the new angel's trumpets will be.”

George's stomach churned at the mention of the angel's trumpets.

“I probably won't get around to planting them for another week or two,” Nan continued. “And, speaking of which, I'm still trying to figure out whether we should plant them at all since you get so freaked out every time you look at the ones that are there already. It's a nice sunny spot. Maybe I'll transplant some of those volunteer spirea there.”

“I have made my peace with the angel's trumpets,” George huffed.

“No, you haven't. I bet you won't come within ten yards of them, even before they bloom. They're really not
that
poisonous, you know. Could they cause some mild hallucinations? Maybe. But you're already hallucinating in your advanced middle age anyway.”

“Could we continue on this Jim-digging-up-our-yard line of conversation, Nan-bee? You might recall that Jim said he wanted to dig up our beautiful blue hydrangea, too. Remember how hard we worked at that to make the blasted soil more alkaline? And now we're going to, what, dig it up, plant another hydrangea, and hope that it turns out as blue as the one we've got now?”

“I know.”

“Those peonies and astilbe that
finally
started to bloom last year would get dug up, too. They were some of your best cross-cultural communicators, or whatever it is you call your little plant buddies. I guess you'll be getting a real earful once they pop up through the soil and find out what you're thinking about.”

“I know, George. I know. I'm willing to say now that's all moot since there's nothing to this buried-treasure talk. I just wanted to find something to get Jim's mind off Alicia. He's so sad these days with her gone and taking the dog and parakeet and his baseball card collection and all.”

George chuckled. In doing so, he elicited a brief, icy stare from Nan. As bad as he felt for Jim, he couldn't help but admire Alicia for running off with the baseball cards, especially the Phil Croxton rookie card. Why, that card must be worth a mint!

“I feel sorry for Jim, too, but listen, will you, Nan-bee: Those won't be dinky little pick-and-shovel jobs Jim was proposing, like last year's. He wants to dig down six or seven feet and ten to twelve feet across. That means you bring in the heavy equipment. How long would it take those scars to heal? And how could your little flower friends ever forgive you? You'd be just another flower murderer in their minds.”

Nan blanched at the thought of having to break the news to some of her flowers that they were to be sacrificed for the sake of filthy lucre. But, hard as it might be to believe, there were other, more pressing matters to consider.

“Listen here, buddy, a few stray gold coins wouldn't have hurt us any, especially since I'm guessing our current financial situation isn't looking all that rosy. Eh?”

George didn't respond. He bit his lip and tightened his grip on the steering wheel. He had begun to fret that they'd been burning through their recent first-place Burdick's Best Yard prize earnings at a clip they couldn't keep up. Maybe he should start paying more attention to their bank accounts and mutual fund balances. Hang on—what mutual fund balances? Oh, yeah, he had cashed those out a couple of months ago.

“Did you hear me, George? Huh?”

George jerked the steering wheel violently to the right to turn onto Old DanTroop Drive. The tires squealed and the car tilted a few degrees as the left-side wheels lifted an inch or two above the road. Nan froze in rigid attention as she heard the squeal and felt the lurch, then leaned against the tilt of the car with a leering grin.

Nan was always excited and sometimes transformed when he took that right-angle intersection at forty, actually speeding up into the turn instead of slowing down. George figured it was because it gave her the sort of adrenaline thrill she didn't often feel among the more subtle attractions of their gardens. Could it be that for those few seconds she was actually inhabited by the spirit of some dangerous woman from times gone by? Annie Oakley, for instance? Whatever it was, it would occasionally create in Nan a trance-like state. That would last about fifteen seconds. Then, once she came out of it, she started with a fresh slate, and anything said or seen during the previous five minutes might as well have never happened.

“Whew!” she gasped. “That was rockin', Pops!”

George chuckled. After a few seconds of silence, he knew he had passed the crisis point; there would be no contentious discussion about the family finances on this drive.

They only had a few blocks to go to one of Livia's finest and most extensive stretches of residential gardens. This, along with Waveland Circle and the Billings Lake neighborhood, was where Livia's gardening bluebloods honed their craft. It was a place that was hallowed—like Gettysburg or a Sagelands merlot vineyard—and through which you traveled awestruck: respectfully, quietly, and attentively.

But they weren't quite there yet.

Nan smiled and rocked her head back slightly. She's lost in appreciation of her own ingenuity, thought George. Brace yourself, buddy, 'cause here it comes.

“Knock-knock,” Nan said.

“Who's there?” answered George for whom Nan's plant jokes and riddles had all the appeal of a prickly sow thistle–induced skin rash.

“Phlox.”

“Phlox who?”

“Phlox of luck getting those marigolds to grow in that shady place next to the rock border.”

“You watch, Nan-bee,” sputtered George. “You just watch. That spot gets six hours of sun a day.”

“No, it doesn't. It gets two and a half hours max. Besides, you were looking at it before the silver maple leafed, and even then it was only getting four hours of sun. Those marigolds will produce no floral display of note. Lord knows, I tried to warn you. Slow down, George.”

They had turned onto Cabot Drive.

George lifted his foot off the accelerator and gently applied it to the brake. Their new, gun-metal-gray Toyota Avalon slowed to five miles per hour—Fremont garden cruising speed.

There were signs of the messy, unattractive beginnings of gardening activity everywhere. Husbands and wives were out in their shorts and T-shirts, baseball caps and broad-brimmed straw gardening hats, working the soil in their flower beds, and carefully inserting little blobs of color into them with their gloved hands. Flats of petunias, alyssum, pansies, coleus, and impatiens seemed to be lying around everywhere, as did gardening forks, shovels, hand trowels, and two-cubic-foot bags of pre-fertilized soil.

But so far, only one week short of Memorial Day weekend, there was little to show for it. Everything seemed to be going so slowly this year. That troubled Nan, for whom bloom bursts of lilacs—both of the regular and dwarf Korean variety—ajuga, irises, and bridal wreath spirea typically marked her favorite holiday, which was by common accounting in this neck of the woods to be the first day of summer. She watched in sullen disappointment as the passing front yards slowly slid by.

About halfway down the block on the right was the Knights'. Here was a sign of encouragement: The Knights' dwarf Korean lilacs were leafing nicely!

“I wonder how they'll look in a week or two, after all that extreme pruning they did last year,” Nan said. “Bleeding hearts are out, but just barely. Must have been the long winter. I mean, jeez, ours just poked through the ground a week or so ago. They're going to get all covered up by the hosta before they even get going.”

Livia's winter had lingered into the first week of May, and it wasn't until late April that the ground finally thawed. The last showers of snowflakes had come in two quick, sloppy bursts just a week and a half earlier. There followed a period of cool, showery weather that had kept everyone indoors. Already it was May 19, and the temperature had just nicked 60 the previous Saturday.

The result of all this was that Livia's gardening season had been set back two to three weeks. Sure, the crocuses and tulips had come out a few weeks ago—bright, shiny medallions of purple, white, red, and yellow punctuating the last watery snow-scapes of the season—but not a sign of hosta. There wasn't even any spring phlox yet.

“Okay,” Nan said. “Time to go check out Waveland Circle. Let's see what Marta Poppendauber's up to this year, assuming she's even started.”

The Burdick's three-foot-by-two-foot wooden sign stood right next to the driveway of the house on Waveland. It trumpeted the news:
CONGRATS! MARTA AND HAM P., RUNNERS-UP, BURDICK'S BEST YARD CONTEST
!

“Hmmm,” said Nan. “How come they haven't put ours back up?
We
won the stupid contest.”

George and Nan gazed into the yard that had so dazzled them last June. Everywhere, there were signs of beginning cultivation, with freshly planted annuals dotting the yard and filling numerous flowerpots—both hanging and on pedestals—of all sizes. Gardening tools and bags of fertilizer were everywhere. Clearly, here was a work of art in the making.

A middle-aged couple stood behind their picture window watching them. They waved. George and Nan waved back to Marta and Ham Poppendauber, and pulled out of the cul-de-sac.

“Time to go check on last year's biggest
loser,
” Nan said.

About a mile to the south, Dr. Phyllis Sproot was outside, squatting over a large patch of freshly turned dirt. She was wearing a big woven-straw sun hat encircled with a black leather band that George couldn't help but imagine emblazoned with a skull and crossbones, sunglasses with oversized lenses that made her look as if she were part praying mantis, and a bandanna knotted into strangulation tightness around her neck. She clawed violently at the ground with a hand cultivator.

“Scary,” Nan whispered.

“Yeah,” George said. “I wonder if she's planning a big comeback this year.”

“Even if she does, who cares? There won't be another contest like last year's to get people all riled up. And there won't be another for four more years if my math's correct. Burdick just said they'd have it every five years, correct? With any luck, we'll all just quietly tend our gardens this year and everyone can keep out of the news. Even a proven gardening thug like Phyllis Sproot might have to behave herself this time.”

Dr. Sproot looked up briefly as they approached, her eyes turned into big black caverns by the capacious sunglasses, a deep scowl painted on what there was of her face that they could see, then resumed viciously attacking her soil.

“Why couldn't someone have been murdered in
her
yard?” Nan said as they drove off toward home. “Step on it, George, before she comes over and kills us or something.”

The drive home continued in its dawdling manner, with occasional short detours to view the beginnings of gardens the Fremonts had only just discovered last year, when they were scoping out the competition for the contest. Not surprisingly, signs of this year's activity were much harder to spot. Livia's fair-weather gardeners had obviously been thwarted by the drawn-out winter and the lack of any high-stakes gardening competition to match last year's.

“Down to the hardcore this year, I guess,” said Nan. “Livia's true-blue gardeners, the ones in it for the long haul. Speaking of which, we'd better get crackin' ourselves. We don't want a couple of girls showing us up, do we?”

George didn't respond. He was stewing about someone getting murdered in their yard, however long ago that might have been.

The Fremonts were intermittent Christians belonging to the Please-Redeem-Me Lutheran Church, an offshoot of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America that allowed a little pagan-flavored nature worship to enter into its doctrine. While that was plenty good enough for Nan, George occasionally entertained extreme spiritual notions more in line with his druidical antecedents. For instance, he thought it was quite possible that malevolent spirits of the unsettled dead rattled around and created mischief in the places where they had died.